


Field Medicine

by BlessedDemeter (sakurazawa)



Category: Shades of London Series - Maureen Johnson
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Stitches
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-21
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-25 18:57:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7544110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sakurazawa/pseuds/BlessedDemeter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Sadie smiled, and the spirit rushed. It zagged around Stephen and slammed straight into Boo, blossoming out of her back with a hellish shriek. Agony, or maybe terror. I held up my hands, but there was no way to stop it.</i>
  <br/>
  <i>The impact was heart-deep. The electric stiffness of power arrested my limbs, and I tumbled back, into the bridge barrier. Over.</i>
  <br/>
  <i>I was falling. There was nothing but gray sky, and brown river, and the smell of burning flowers, until I crashed through the frigid murk of river below. Then there was nothing at all.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In a safe-house outside of London, Rory deals with spirits, stitches, and Stephen Dene.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Painkiller

_ _

 

_Sadie smiled, and the spirit rushed. It zagged around Stephen and slammed straight into Boo, blossoming out of her back with a hellish shriek. Agony, or maybe terror. I held up my hands, but there was no way to stop it._

_The impact was heart-deep. The electric stiffness of power arrested my limbs, and I tumbled back, into the bridge barrier. Over._

_I was falling. There was nothing but gray sky, and brown river, and the smell of burning flowers, until I crashed through the frigid murk of river below. Then there was nothing at all._

#

The safe house was forty minutes outside London. Well, forty minutes at Stephen-speed, which I guess meant it would have taken mortal drivers at least an hour. I’d curled in the back seat, bleeding into his coat, with Boo and Callum on either side, trying to keep pressure on my my wound. An equally soaked Thorpe made call after angry-sounding call from the passenger’s seat.

Apparently, he’d gone in after me. Just dove, straight into the Thames in his three-thousand-dollar suit and Michael Phelpsed it to the piling I’d managed to tangle myself in. Incidentally, the piling that saved my life had also sliced open my shoulder with a jagged piece of rusted steel strut, exposing me to whatever zombie outbreak viruses lived in the river. Zombie viruses were bad, but Thorpe was good. I officially liked Thorpe. Go Thorpe. If we both ended up as zombies, I would totally join his brain-eating team.

Stephen drove. Tense shoulders, slow, even breathing, laser focus. Almost. In the moments when I was lucid, when pain dragged me out of dizzy-town, I looked at his eyes in the rearview. Every time, the blue irises snapped to me, bright with an emotion somewhere between horror and fury and impossible guilt. Every time we locked eyes, I swear he drove just a little faster.

The house was small, a single downstairs kitchen and den combo with a series of small upstairs rooms. The air had that dense smell, like it had been shut inside for too long and all sunk to the bottom floor. Every footstep creaked.

Callum carried me through the doorway and up the stairs. Then, somehow, I was sitting fully clothed in a discolored porcelain tub, water sluicing over me from a sputtering showerhead. Boo was behind me, keeping a drenched towel pressed into my shoulder.

Pinkish brown liquid swirled down the drain at my feet. I stared at the vortex in fascination--It reminded me of Granny Deveaux’s sherbet punch, that time Miss Rhonda Raine’s six-year-old nephew tossed a boomerang into the Junior League’s drink table and knocked the bowl into the gator pond. It had foamed up, neapolitan swirls of passion-fruit and pond scum.

I told this to Boo, who humored me with a laugh.

“Who keeps an alligator pond?”

“Well, it’s not really supposed to be a gator pond. The country club actually made it to be a duck pond, but it’s Louisiana, so of course the gators fund it, and once they eat all the ducks, you can’t really call it a duck pond anymore.”

“I guess not,” she said.

There was a commotion of opening and closing doors downstairs, followed by muffled voices. Boo leaned forward and turned off the shower.

“Right then, come on,” she said, and hauled me up onto the side of the tub, where I sat shivering like one of those little dogs inbred into neurological dysfunction. Moments later, the voices on the stairs got clearer, and I recognized Dr. Marigold’s smooth, cultured alto.

“I was not aware anyone _had_ the ability to command ghosts,” she said, coming to the doorway, Thorpe in tow behind her.

“We’re still putting together the picture of what exactly Sidney and Sarah Smithfield-Wyatt _are_ capable of.”

I looked up at Dr. Marigold, and Dr. Marigold looked down at the puddle I was making on the old-fashioned tile floor. She took a dainty step back in her shiny leather pumps.

“I brought antibiotics, Agent Thorpe--not a surgical kit,” she snapped. “You should have said it was this bad.” She followed the comment with a list of commands so efficient, even Thorpe hustled. She extracted a pair of scissors from her neon blue Coach bag--which she placed on the counter, well away from my puddle.

The next few minutes were spent cutting off my sweater. Marigold slid the scissors under the collar and cut down the length of my arm, then took my opposite hand and cut up the other sleeve. Finally, the only thing holding it up was the water suctioning it to my skin. I plucked at it with my good hand, but my fingers shook too hard to peel the sweater away. In the end, Boo helped me.

My sports bra--which, thanks to Boo’s shopping habits, had once been a glass-shattering shade of turquoise--was discolored with watercolor stains of rusty blood. The brief deluge of shower water hadn’t managed to wash away all the blood that had dried on my chest and stomach, and I finally noticed the rip in the calf of my jeans, and the gummy cut still oozing down my ankle. Marigold cut away the bottom leg of my jeans on that side, but left the other side untouched.

Dr. Marigold pulled out a couple antiseptic wipes, some tweezers, and a lighter from her purse. This seemed to upset her, though, because she was catching up to Stephen in the Olympic sport of frowning.

The bathroom room door opened and cold hallway air snaked around my shoulders. Callum leaned in and looked me over, apparently unimpressed by the eyeful of bloody, sports-bra clad Rory.

“What the hell sort of safe-house has no rubbing alcohol or mouthwash?”

“The kind that hasn’t been used for twelve years,” Marigold muttered, adding a pair of gray latex gloves and a tiny mending kit to the pile of stuff from her bag. “I'll need some kind of disinfectant. She went into the Thames, and there's no telling what sort of contaminants were on that strut.”

“Yeah, I know. I ran to the liquor store down the street and grabbed this.” He handed over a half pint of clear liquid. Dr. Marigold held it up, her eyebrows slowly lifting.

“You're going to clean it with...whipped cream flavored vodka?” Boo asked.

“They were out of regular,” Callum said, as more footsteps creaked on the stairs. “It was the best I could find.”

“And you didn't think to look for something else?”

“As long as there’s no sugar, it shouldn’t be a problem,” Marigold said, sounding exasperated with the entire conversation.

Then Stephen appeared in the doorway. His brow bore the expected furrow, his mouth the customary frown behind forty-eight hours of stubble. Given another day or two, he’d have enough scruff going to fit in with the English Grad students that smoked outside Benouville’s only used bookstore. At the sight of him, some before-unnoticed tension in my chest relaxed.

“It has to be at least 35% ABV to disinfect,” he said. His voice--already deep--was gravelly with exhaustion. “You couldn't find plain, Callum? We might as well just use vanilla extract--it’s higher proof.”

“No, I couldn't bloody well find plain!” Callum barked. “And I don't want to know how you know the exact proof to disinfect wounds.”

“Field medicine training?” Marigold asked.

“Chemistry,” Stephen replied, inspecting the label. “And curiosity. It’s fine. This will work.” He handed the bottle back to Marigold, who cracked the seal.

“Are you _sure_ ?” Callum drawled. “They didn't have rubbing alcohol or listerine, but they _certainly fucking had_ vanilla extract.”

Stephen lifted an eyebrow, possibly because Callum seemed more stressed about the shop’s poor selection than any of the other weird stuff that had happened. Possibly because he’d made a joke. I decided to make one too, just to show I was okay, and they could all stop worrying.

“I'd smell delicious,” I said. “Or, I guess, with the Thames water and stuff, I’d probably smell like an air freshener someone threw out of a car and ran over a couple times...”

Stephen sighed, clearly not appreciating my humor, which wasn’t exactly a shock. Still, it would have been nice to see that line between his brow disappear. It would have made the fact that I was about to get battlefield stitches feel a little less scary.

Marigold pressed her lips and considered the label again. “It won’t sterilize the needle, unfortunately. And alcohol is a lytic substance, so it will kill healthy cells as well. There will be a fair amount of scar tissue if I clean it with this.”

I put a hand over the big pink line on my abdomen, and felt the hysterical laugh bubble up in my chest. “You mean I’ll have a _scar_ ? My life is _over_.”

“Sarcasm won’t make this hurt less, Aurora.”

“You must not know me.”

Then Dr. Marigold unfolded the mending kit and pulled out a needle pre-threaded with black string. Suddenly, I had nothing else to say. She fished around in her bag.

“Is there any floss, or fishing line? The cotton will grow into the skin and make removal difficult. Also, some pliers.”

While Callum and Stephen went back on the hunt, Dr. Marigold peeled the towel from my shoulder. Fresh blood oozed down my arm and dripped off my elbow to the edge of the tub. Boo snagged another towel from the rack and started squeezing the water from my hair.

Callum returned first, with a box of dental floss from Freddie--who’d apparently arrived with Dr. Marigold and had time to pack a bag. A minute or two later, Stephen returned with a metal file and a dusty set of pliers from the car.

There were a few minutes of prepping, which consisted of Marigold dousing everything in sweet-smelling vodka. I watched with a combination of interest and nausea as Stephen honed the end of the needle, then heated it with the lighter. He didn’t stop until it glowed bright amber in the grip of the pliers.

Boo chucked my hair towel at the door and held my good shoulder, letting me lean back against her leg. “Is there anything we can do for the pain?”

I swallowed, trying not to look at the needle now sitting on a vodka-soaked washcloth. It should not have been so terrifying--after all, I’ve been stabbed by way worse things than sewing needles. But it was. Probably because I had way too much time to stare at it, and imagine it jabbing into my wound.

Marigold held up the vodka. “Multi-purpose, I suppose.”

“Right.”

We all looked at Stephen. I’m not sure what we expected him to do--have a brilliant alternative, maybe some kitchen chemistry-version of lidocain. At least some hesitation. But he just plucked the bottle from the counter and handed it to me. I pressed my fingers into the thick plastic, trying to still my hands, but the bottle trembled in my grip anyway. Stephen’s fingers returned, curving around mine very gently, steadying the bottle.

“Drink fast. You want it to hit your system quickly if it’s going to make a difference.”

I nodded, pressed my lips to the bottle, and took a gulp. It hit the back of my throat like a sucker-punch, but I took three or four big swallows, shuddering at the gasoline burn of it going down my chest.

“Whoever said that tasted like whipped cream should be taken to court for fraud,” I said. Then coughed, and tasted just a hint of the reported flavor. I decided not to mention it.

Stephen handed the bottle to Marigold, who was busy snapping a second pair of gloves over her first pair. Why she needed two pairs of gloves, right on top of each other, I had no idea, and I didn’t ask.

I knew what came next, and I wobbled a bit on the edge of the tub, trying to shift so I wouldn’t fall off the edge of the tub when the pain hit. I tried not to concentrate on the weirdly-sweet smell of the alcohol, or the fact that Callum was climbing into the tub to stand behind me with Boo.

“All right. There’s sediment in the gash, so I’ll have to scrub it out.”

“Can you not tell me what you’re going to do?” I asked. “I really, really don’t want to know.”

The doctor gestured at Boo, Callum, and Stephen, I guess to hold me steady. Boo wrapped her hand around my forehead, pulling me back against her stomach, and Callum sat on the side of the tub next to me, gripping my arm. His hand was hot on my skin.

“Is it hitting you yet?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. I think I lost some blood, so it’s pretty much even between that and the vodka.”

Stephen crouched in front of me, crossing a long forearm over my knees, leaning his chest right into them. I froze. I mean, of course I did. Stephen was not the knee-touching type. In any other circumstance, I would have been excited by this, but my jeans were already darkening his shirt, and the way he clenched his jaw set the vodka in my stomach sloshing nervously.

He took my wrist on the injured side, pressing his thumb a little just below the bone. His palm was warm on the back of my hand, and I thought he might be taking my pulse. When he glanced down at his watch, I knew he was.

“What’s my heart rate?” I asked, partly to tease him.

He was quiet for a few more seconds. “About one-fifteen,” he said. He didn’t let go, just glanced up at me with that troubled expression, the corners of his mouth pulling down a little further. It made my heart do a little double-thump. I wondered if he noticed. I kind of hoped he had.

“I guess that’s good?” I said. “Everything’s working.”

Marigold pressed her fingers to my shoulder, using one hand to pry apart the lips of the wound. I gasped at the sudden, rude shock, and all the hands holding onto me tensed. My eyes squeezed shut, and I blew out the breath, very slowly, trying to convince myself it didn’t really hurt.

“Resting tachycardia is only present after injuries with blood-loss of over fifteen percent,” Marigold said. “So, no--not good. Allso not particularly bad, since the tachycardia-vasoconstrictor response drops off after thirty-percent. Also you’re still conscious and relatively lucid.”

I'm sure Stephen understood that, but I sure didn't. At least, until the part about being conscious and lucid. “Lucky me.”

She poured vodka into the wound, and suddenly every nerve ending in my body curled in on itself, burning. I jerked, gagged on the noise of pain, and felt my friends’ hands controlling the instinctive struggle until I managed to control my body again.

Then something wet and rough dug into the gash, digging into the clotting blood and blossoming infection, sweeping it all out. More vodka, rinsing away whatever gunk Marigold’s washcloth had dislodged. I was sweating, biting my cheeks until I wasn’t sure if it was just the smell, or if I was actually tasting blood.

This repeated a few times until Dr. Marigold declared the wound as clean as she could get it. Boo let go of my head, and Callum’s death grip on my arm loosened. Stephen stayed where he was, probably because he was afraid I’d fall of the edge of the tub otherwise. In fairness, I might have.

It was quiet and tense in the little bathroom, which bothered me almost as much as the smell of mingled blood and whipped-cream. I decided to break it.

“I’m going to need, like, five more shots of vodka,” I said. This might have been funnier if my teeth weren’t chattering.

“What you need is to stop getting yourself stabbed,” Callum said.

“That would certainly be better for my blood pressure,” Stephen agreed.

I opened my eyes, training a glare straight through his glasses. “You can talk to me about blood pressure when you’ve had to bring someone back to life, Mr. Just-a-little-bump-on-the-head.”

He almost smiled. Instead, he turned a slightly-squinted gaze onto Dr. Marigold. “Would the stitches be easier somewhere more stable?”

Dr. Marigold gestured at the bathroom counter. My breath was still coming a little short, but I needed to do something on my own--reestablish some personal control before I dissolved into a shaking, nauseated wreck. I shifted forward, testing my weight on my feet and, with Stephen’s hands under my elbows, stood up.

  
The first second was fine. I was a little unsteady, sure, but the light balance of Stephen’s forearms under my hands was enough. Then my gut went cold, and dropped into my shoes. There was a feeling like someone had jerked a stopper from the base of my skull, a draining sort of pull that emptied my head of warmth. The bathroom twisted around me.


	2. Suture

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rory gets stitches.

_ _

The next few moments were dark, chaotic, and cold. I was in the Thames all over again, breathing water, slammed into circles by a frigid current. Except parts of me were warm, and still. No, my mind was moving. Just my mind. Like it was my brain that was cold and floating, while my body remained stable--anchored by an arm around my back, and another pressing my head against the front of a warm shirt.

Stephen was kneeling, and I was 90% sure I was sitting on his thigh, leaning back against his bent knee.

“Did she pass out?”

“Is it the alcohol?”

“Is she okay?”

“Blood pressure,” Marigold said. “Stephen, I thought you were going to pick her up.”

“I didn’t think she’d want me to.”

All those words, splashing cold against my brain, asking it to process language through the rolling waves of pain. I made some kind of noise--a growl, or something equally inhuman and annoyed. 

Stephen said something I didn’t really hear, but his voice reverberated in his chest, vibrating my cheek. That was fine. The talking, not so much, but the feeling of it resonating. I could concentrate on that.

His grip on me shifted to the loops of my jeans. As he pulled me into a slightly more stable position against him, his chest tensed under my hand, the muscles moving very obviously beneath a shirt that was now growing wet, thanks to me. 

The observation almost made me smile, until I remembered how much everything hurt. I might have been a little dumb with the pain, but being dumb gave my brain a bit more license to perv in ways that would usually be kind of embarrassing, so I was willing to embrace it for a while.

Pain, bad. Slightly-damp shape of Stephen’s body right up against me? Good.

He had a solid chest, and arms. Rowing, I guess. All that pulling at oars. But he didn’t row anymore, did he? I tried to imagine him in one of those long, narrow boats on the Thames, but my brain conjured him in police uniform. That wasn’t right. Stupid brain, try something else. Shirtless? I’d seen him shirtless. I could imagine shirtless. It was too cold for shirtless right now. But was it always too cold?

The world gave a violent twist. I clenched my eyes against the torque of the bathroom.

“I could get her to the sink, but I’m not sure it would be any more stable in this condition. We could move her to another room, or-”

“If you can hold her still, this is fine. Thank God she’s passed out--this is the worst part.”

“I’m not passed out.” I tried to say it, but the words trapped in the wrinkles of Stephen’s shirt.

There was a pause, then, “What did she say?” Marigold asked.

“I’m... not sure. However, I think it’s safe to say she isn't as unconscious as one might hope.”

“Can you keep her still?”

Stephen hesitated, and I felt his heart kick against my cheek. He would not want to hold me still, not while Marigold was giving me stitches and I was jerking in pain. Stephen was stoic, but he was, I had learned, way too compassionate for his own good. And he actively tried to keep me from being hurt. This would only intensify that guilt so clear in his eyes.

“I can ask Tobias to restrain her.”

It took me a moment to work out that the only person in the house who could be called Tobias was Thorpe. Which was super weird, because people like Thorpe didn’t have first names, because they didn’t have parents, because they weren’t born. They sprang, fully formed into the world, already wearing a boring suit.

Then my body processed the word ‘restrain’, and I curled my fingers into Stephen’s shirt. I think I managed to shake my head.

I may have been a recent recruit to Team Thorpe, but that did not mean I wanted him to restrain me while Dr. Marigold shoved a shard of metal into my skin. No, if anyone was going to hold me down, I wanted it to be Stephen...which was a thought I maybe didn’t need to explore in more detail. At least until I wasn’t bleeding all over his arm.

His chin moved against my head in what I guess was a nod, because he shifted his grip, pinning one of my arms between us, and holding the other against my side.

“I’m going to need you to be very still, Aurora,” Dr. Marigold said. “Try to keep this shoulder relaxed.” i felt her fingers on my skin, pulling down the right strap of my sports bra.

As an experiment, I opened my eyes. At first, all I saw was gray--the long-sleeved tee shirt Stephen had changed into. Then, slowly, my vision focused enough to identify dark stains where my hair had wet the fabric. The damp patch turned in my vision. I pinched my eyes closed again.

“Oh God, I can’t watch.” Boo’s voice sounded pained, and a second later the door shut, and two sets of footsteps creaked on the floorboards, then on the stairs

I heard a plasticky snap, and then Dr. Marigold braced her fingers--cleanly gloved--on my shoulder. I took a breath, fear pulsing in my brain. Stephen’s arm was under my fingers; I tightened my grip, and steeled myself for pain.

Marigold pushed the needle in.

Interesting fact--medical needles aren’t just sharp at the tip, like sewing needles. They’ve got an edge, like a sword. That’s so it can actually cut through your skin without much resistance, which is way less painful than, say, a needle that’s just a sharp little point. I’d looked this all up while recovering from the ripper attack.

We didn't have a surgical needle. So when I say she pushed it in, I mean pushed. My skin did not want to part, so it took a good bit of hand strength to get it through. I felt it shift the skin and muscle.

A sound escaped my throat--some bastard cousin of a gurgle and a grunt. Stephen found the back of my neck and held my head still against his chest.

The needle poked into the opposite side of the wound, jabbing into flesh already inflamed and raw. Stephen’s grip was stone, unmoving, even when I dug my nails into his arm.

The thread tightened, tugged. I swallowed a whine, chest heaving with the shallow gasps that seemed to be all my lungs could manage.

“Good girl. That’s it--you’re doing really well. Better than a lot of grown men.” Marigold’s voice was right at my back. “Just a few more.”

I started to shake. Not the little tremors you get when you’ve had too much coffee or forgotten a sweater at the movies--I mean the kind that start in your bones and rattle out into every muscle. The kind you can’t stop, that take over and force you to acknowledge that there is something very, very wrong, and you need to deal with it. Or hide.

Stephen made a quiet noise in his chest, and then he was saying something into my hair. Something with an inquisitive little lift at the end of the sentence. I didn’t hear words, just his tone--that same gentle tone he used when he was trying to soothe a ghost. My head filled with the sound of it, deep and surprisingly warm. Whatever he’d asked, I didn’t respond. And then his grip on my neck lightened, and his thumb made soft, apologetic movements behind my ear.

I would have done a lot of pretty terrible things to get this exact moment, minus the injuries and all the people who were not me and Stephen.

Marigold started the second stitch. My reaction was much the same. I heard her murmur behind me, “Pass out, love. I need six more of these.”

She ended up needing eight. And while I didn't pass out, I’m not sure when I realized it was actually over--whether it was the drizzle of vodka on the sutures, or the snap of Marigold’s gloves coming off, or Stephen, pulling me with him as he sank back against the bathroom cabinet.

I waited there, curled against his chest, and lost track of how many heartbeats passed. Marigold spoke quietly to Callum and Boo in the doorway? My pulse made lambent little flashes behind my eyes, and all I could do was breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

“Rory?” His voice, very quiet. Right in my ear. I inhaled. Exhaled. Nodded. “It's done. It's ...it's done.” I heard what he didn't say--that he was sorry. That he blamed himself. That he wanted to do something to fix things, and had no solution. This was the only comfort he could offer.

I squeezed his arm.

Stephen’s hand finally left the back of my neck, and a second later, I heard the click of his glasses on the counter. I could picture him, pinching the bridge of his nose. Rubbing a hand over his face, and gazing up at the wallpaper with tired eye. His fingertips grazed the skin just beside the line of stitches, and I shuddered. He dropped his palm to my back.

That’s when I realized...his hand was shaking too.

“Are you okay?” They were the first coherent words I’d managed, but they still came out sloppy.

Stephen gave a single, humorless huff--the kind of laugh you give when something’s definitely not funny. “Fine. Though it’s not an exercise I’m eager to repeat.”

“Maybe you should have had the vodka,” I slurred. “It didn’t help me.”

“I’m considering it.”

I heard the clicking of Dr. Marigold’s high heels going down the stairs. Apparently, her work here was done, and she was willing to leave the rest of my care up to Stephen, Callum, and Boo.

We lapsed into silence again, a silence during which I burrowed my face past Stephen’s collar and found the hot skin of his neck. He smelled of sweat, and blood, and rain water, which I'm sure was an improvement on whatever I smelled like.

A dry towel appeared on my back, and I found myself being shifted so Boo and Stephen could tuck it around me. His hands lingered on my shoulder blades.

“Rory?” Boo said. Her long fingernails slid into my hair, tucked it behind my ear. “We cleared out a room for you. Come on--you need to rest. Come on.”

Stephen got his arm under my knees and, with Boo steadying me in his grip, stood up. Muscle is pretty heavy, so It was probably a good thing I've never been athletic, but my strict diet of sausage and cheese whiz didn’t exactly leave me with the waif-like figure of a Disney princess. I wouldn’t have been surprised if picking me up from the floor was too hard to do alone.

Stephen struggled with the awkward grip, but once he got his feet under him, stood up a lot faster than expected. Boo kept me steady in his grasp, and I tried not to be dead weight. My hand thwacked into his shoulder, failed to grab hold, then slid off. God, I couldn't even hold on. All my limbs were heavy and boneless.

It occurred to me that this was the only time he’d ever picked me up. Callum had done it. Boo had literally thrown me over her shoulder after I blocked a ball in hockey. (That had been an accident. I tried to dodge, and ended up throwing myself into the ball’s path.)

I considered being embarrassed. This lasted about the three seconds before I realized the process of slinging a girl who barely reached five-four wasn’t ever going to be hard for Stephen. He was nearly a foot taller, and he'd been athletic at school.

Boo ducked around us, and Stephen carried me into the hall and through another doorway.

“Oh my God!”

I opened my eyes at the sound of Freddie’s voice, managing a little curl of my fingers that was something like a wave. There she stood, all messy red hair and freckled worry.

“Is she going to be all right? What did Dr. Marigold say? Are those…”

“Stitches,” Stephen said. He lowered my legs to the floor,waited until I got my feet under me before straightening himself. His arm didn't leave my back, keeping me upright and held against him. “Did you bring extra clothes?”

“I--yes. Um. Hang on.”

I felt Stephen turn his head to look at Boo. “I should…Can you handle this?”

“Yeah, ‘course.” Boo’s arm appeared around me, taking my weight from Stephen. She was warm, and familiar, but I immediately missed the feeling of him towering over me. “You might want to get changed as well. You’ve got blood all over.”

“Right.” Stephen’s hand squeezed by arm, then vanished. I heard his footsteps creak on the floor, followed by the sound of the door closing behind him.

“Okay,” Boo said. “Freddie, can you get her jeans? I’m gonna have to hold her up.”

The next few minutes were weird. Freddie and Boo undressing me, drying me off with towels, and guiding my wobbly legs into a pair of flannel pajama bottoms. At last, I ended up in bed, propped into a half-sitting position on the pillows as Boo used a tiny travel hair dryer on the lowest setting.

I shivered despite the hot air blowing across my scalp, and my eyes didn’t want to stay open. They felt too big for the sockets, pressing against bone and eyelid. Freddie brought me tea, and as she slipped through the door, I thought I heard the shower going.

I don't know how much tea I made it through before I fell asleep. I woke up briefly when the door closed, knowing I was alone. It must have been hours later when Dr. Marigold woke me with an IV needle in my arm. Then a flush of relief ran through my veins, sapping the pain, and delivering me back into deep, solid oblivion.


	3. Identity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rory and Stephen receive their new identities.

When I climbed out of sleep, it was with the faint annoyance of a cold nose and something tickling my ear. I opened my eyes, and the digital clock illuminated the bare walls and a flaccid IV bag, which hung from the bedpost above me. It took a few seconds of mental fumbling to remember where I was, and why I felt like my entire body was made of rubber bands.

I grunted, and pushed the fringe of weirdly-short hair from my face. The clock read 10:00 AM, but that seemed wrong. It was too dark. I glanced at the window. Its thick wooden blinds slanted down toward me, giving me a broken view of the sky, which was all mottled gray and navy. There was just enough of a weird glow to it to trigger recognition in my brain.

It was morning, but it was an overcast morning about to unleash rain. A few minutes later, the rumble of thunder confirmed my suspicion.

It was cold. I peeked under the covers and found myself wearing a tee shirt that still had a long, clear “Size M” sticker down the front. On the bottom, I wore pajama pants in a faded, graying blue. The latter were worn to softness, with a faint pattern of stars.

I didn’t hurt right now, but my stomach felt so tight I was either starving or sick. Also, I really had to pee. I glanced at the IV in my arm, then squinted through the darkness at the bag. It turned out to be saline, which at least explained why I needed to pee when I hadn’t had anything to drink in the last twenty-four hours. Well, nothing but half a cup of tea and several shots of vodka.

I stared at the tube for a moment, trying to figure out my next step. My brain moved through the sluggish current of painkillers and it arrived at a crossroads: I would either have to carry around the saline bag or take the thing out of my arm.

The thought of carrying around an empty IV bag was too creepy, like the horror hospital patient equivalent of a teddy bear. Still, I didn’t want to remove the catheter without Dr. Marigold’s permission. I looked at the little, butterfly-shaped piece of plastic taped to my arm, with its stinger-like needle. I’d seen nurses hook up the IVs to the little nozzle when I was at the hospital. How had they done it?

I fumbled with plastic switches until I managed to stop the flow from the bag and unscrewed the tube. It dribbled a bit of saline on the bed. I dropped it, leaving only the butterfly-shaped catheter and it’s little tail of tube and nozzle, all of which were taped to my arm.

This small success energized me. I got up. The hallway was hardwood, a cold shock on my bare feet. I shivered and made my way unsteadily to the bathroom.

I tried not to look too hard at the grout between the floor tiles, but it was pointless. Even the bar of hotel soap on the side of the sink had a slight pink tinge to it.

Yep. Rory, girl wonder, had lost a lot of blood. Again.

I made my way down the stairs and found Callum and Freddie at the little dining room table, working their way through bowls of cereal. Freddie saw me first. She popped up straight in her chair and rushed to finish chewing her food. Her swallow looked painful.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. She pushed a fresh bowl and spoon in front of an empty place at the table.

“Really out of it,” I said. “I’m either hungover or on some crazy painkillers.”

Callum pushed out a chair with his foot. “Probably a little of both.”

I flopped into the chair, prompting Callum to steady it with a hand. As if by unspoken agreement, Freddie poured me a bowl of cereal and Callum went to flick the button on the kettle. Apparently, I could not be trusted with my own breakfast.

The cereal was cold, and I shivered as it went down.

“Where is everyone?” I asked. Thorpe and Marigold’s absence was no surprise, but I’d expected Boo and Stephen to be around. However--and I suspect Callum knew this--what I really wanted to know was, where Stephen was. We’d barely had him back for a week, and I don’t think any of us were quite ready to let him out of our sights. I still didn’t feel quite centered when he wasn’t around.

Freddie grinned, that look of wonder crossing her face, as if she still couldn’t quite believe she was a part of this. Of course, she hadn’t been through the worst of it. She hadn’t lost Stephen.

“Agent Thorpe had to make some arrangements back at MI5, and I believed Dr. Marigold was off to ‘get supplies’? I don’t suppose she can have unlimited access to certain medications without accountability. I imagine there’s a way for those in the security business to order things like that without precise-”

“Boo and Stephen went to check on a lead in Coventry,” Callum interrupted. “They’ll be back in a few hours.”

“What's in Coventry?”

“No idea.”

Freddie put down her spoon. “At least one castle. If I remember correctly, Mary Queen of Scotts was kept there in a tower for several years. It’s very possible there are ghosts who might know something. I think they were following up on someone who used to know Sid and Sadie. Some place they might have gone.”

Thorpe came back just as I finished eating.

“Good, you’re awake,” he said, and dropped a surprisingly thick Manila envelope on the table in front of me. “You can get started on memorizing this.”

I stared at it without quite understanding, then looked at an identical envelope still in his hands. He must have read the confusion on my face, because he said, “Your new identities.”

I blinked, staring at the envelope that now seemed so thin, considering there was an entire life supposedly tucked inside. “And that’s Stephen’s?” I asked, pointing at the second one in his hand.

“Yes.”

“Great. He’ll have his memorized in, like, an hour. I’m gonna need a couple weeks to remember all this stuff.”

“Do what you can. It will take some adjustment. For both of you.”

“And for us,” Callum said. “Remembering the new names. Not talking about things from your old life.”

Old life. Weirdly, what came to mind when I thought of my ‘old life’ was the inflatable alligator over my bed at home. Marci gras beads around the neck, it’s soothingly furrowed belly of pale yellow. Hot summers with sweet tea on the back porch with Granny Deveaux, listening to her talk about her friends and their multitude of medical problems. I remembered the smell of the honeysuckle outside my cousin Diane’s house.

That wasn’t my life anymore. I mean, it could be for about a week or so every year--I could go home, so long as I didn’t leave London at the same time as the rest of the Termini. I mean, we had yet to test this theory, but I’d managed as far as Bristol without throwing the city into a white fog of the dead. Stephen had said that probably meant I could go as far as Louisiana, as long as I didn’t stay long.

And maybe… Maybe I could convince him to come with me. I had a weird memory, from a dream or something, where Stephen was standing in my room, strong shoulders outlined in bright afternoon sun.

I opened the envelope and pulled out a folder, stuffed with papers.

“Selena Jefferson from Raleigh, North Carolina.” I looked up at Thorpe. “I don’t sound like I’m from North Carolina. The accent’s different.”

“Very few people in England will know that,” he said. “Could you tell apart an accent from Dorset and an accent from Bath?”

“Considering I don’t know where those are?” I said, leafing through the pages. “I get it. Fine. Go Tarheels. Wait, you made me older?”

“Making you a legal adult simplifies things,” Thorpe said. “It’s only a difference of a few months.”

I chewed my lip, nodding. It was kind of weird to miss my eighteenth birthday. I mean, it’s kind of a big deal. But I guess there were more important things to worry about than celebrating my official transition into adulthood. I paged through a lifetime worth of medical records and elementary school report cards, a history that had me graduating American high school at sixteen and moving to London by myself.

It was all very tidy, like the subscription box version of a life. I like I could just take a quiz and sign up, get a new identity in the mail every month and become someone new.

Stephen and Boo returned a little after three. The kitchen became a bustle of activity as Callum and Freddie rushed to update them on my new identity, while Boo put on the kettle for tea. Stephen lowered himself into the chair next to me, leaning over to look at the papers I’d spread across the tabletop.

I pushed the dossier’s cover sheet toward him and watched his eyes flick rapidly from line to line. His foot had come to rest right next to mine, and I could feel the warmth of it through his sock. My bare feet were cold. 

“Selena’s not really the name I would have picked,” I said, nudging my toes against his foot. “Not sure I can quite pull it off.”

Stephen gave a thoughtful grunt. “I expect it was a play on the name Aurora,” he said, lifting his foot just enough to admit my toes beneath. “In mythology, her sister is Luna, goddess of the moon. The Greek embodiment is Selene.”

“Still. It seeme a little...I don’t know. Calm? For me?”

That got a twitch of a smile. His foot pressed gently down on mine, resting there as if it were the most normal thing in the world. It was weird, knowing how aware we both were of just that small point of contact, and how much we wanted to pretend it wasn’t a big deal. To me, though, it felt almost… almost like a promise.

Stephen reached across the table to the second envelope. I watched him unwind the string. Inside that envelope was something he’d probably wanted for a long time. A different past. A clean slate. A severing of the connection to his parents and the name that kept them together.

He’d have a new name too. I wondered if I could ever call him anything but Stephen. I couldn’t think of any other name that could fit him. He was just...Stephen.

Stephen pulled out the sheet and, after a quick scan, nodded. It was my turn to lean in.

Stephen’s new name was...Stephen. They’d kept his first name the same, which I guess made sense. I mean, Stephen is a way more common name than Aurora, and he was English, which meant he wouldn’t stand out quite so much. The last name was Lancaster, which fit him about as well as Selene did me.

“That’s not so bad,” I said. “Didn’t they win the War of the Roses?”

“Mmm.” His eyes were moving rapidly, and a little crease had formed above his nose. He was sinking into the information, and I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get much more conversation from him for a while.

“How you feeling, Rory?” Boo asked, setting a cup of tea by Stephen’s elbow, and one next to mine.

Actually...I was pretty tired. I hadn’t really noticed until she said something, but my whole body felt like it was weighed down with sandbags. And my shoulder was throbbing.

“Fine, I guess?” I said. “Tired, mostly. I forgot how much you have to sleep after you lose blood.”

Boo nodded. “Right. Maybe you should go sleep a while? We’ll wake you up if we find anything.”

I shook my head. “I can help.”

“With what? We’ve got all the papers and stuff organized, and it’s not like we’ve got loads of information.”

Stephen had gone still, clearly broken from his trance and listening to our conversation. “It’s true,” he said. “All we can do right now is reconnaissance and then try to react to anything that happens.”

“What about plotting the map. I could work on that.”

Stephen gave me a sharp look, like he knew I was trying to use his love of maps to get him to agree with me. I smiled. He tried not to.

“I think it would be more valuable for you to be well-rested,” he said. “The map can wait.”

“Something is more valuable than a map?” I said, feigning shock.

Callum laughed. “It can’t be true. Where’s the real Stephen?”

Stephen quirked an eyebrow. “Buried under several orders of government-sanctioned identity fraud.” He flipped a paper over, scanning a High School record. “Perhaps the Lancaster breed of Stephen isn’t interested in cartography.”

I laughed. “That might be a tough role for you. Maybe Stephen Lancaster’s interest in maps is just a casual, like, non-GPS-level interest.”

“Or maybe,” Stephen said, scanning farther down the page, “he dropped out of University to become a cabbie.”

Everyone laughed, even Thorpe. I twitched my foot under Stephen’s. He pressed down. This sent a little thrill up my leg, and I found my face going hot as the thrill turned into a full-body tingle. What I wanted to do was push aside the papers, climb into his lap, and kiss him until the world went white around us. Instead, I tilted my head down and pretended to read my old elementary school report while I fought the sensation curling through all the soft parts of my body.

It was another forty-five minutes before the tiredness won out. I didn’t even realize I’d nodded off until Boo’s long fingernails scratched through my hair. “Come on, Rory. Let’s get you upstairs.”

“I’m Selena now, remember?” I said. When I stood, I wobbled into her side. My legs and knees felt like gelatin barely molded around rubbery bones. “Whoa…my legs are morons right now.”

“Yeah, you need to rest.”

I held onto Boo’s arm as Stephen stood up and put an arm around my waist. I felt my head dragging down, down, down...the warmth of Boo’s shoulder under my cheek. The comforting sound of familiar voices. Stephen’s hand, hot over the stripe of skin where my sweater had ridden up.

Then I was between cool sheets, blankets heavy and thick, and a comforting darkness swelled up to greet me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *explodes glitter* STRESS MEANS I NEED TO WRITE STEPHEN. At least one more chapter coming in the next few days--sorry it's taken me so long to update! <3


	4. Ask Me to Stay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rory and Stephen have a tense discussion about his role in possibly forcing her to stay in London forever.

When I climbed back from the far reaches of sleep, I knew I wasn't alone. Someone was at my back, stretched out, making a depression in the mattress that tilted me back toward him. Maybe it was how he breathed, or how I could sense his height in the way his legs extended well past mine. Or maybe It was the fact that he was on top of the blankets, but I knew it was Stephen.

He was sleeping. Possibly unintentionally, but he was. And he was right next to me, close enough to feel his breath shifting the mattress

I twisted onto my back. He was there, propped up on a couple of pillows with his laptop across his legs. A sentence in what I assumed was Latin bounced around his screen, and while he’d folded one arm across his stomach, the other looked like it had recently fallen to the blankets.

He wore a dark blue tee shirt with gray sweatpants. They were not the thick, scratchy sweats you can buy at the big box stores in Benouville, which don't try to flatter anyone. There was a clingy sort of drape to this fabric, like it was made of something more expensive than simple cotton. I suspected Boo had been shopping until I noticed the wear on them. There was a hole where the shirt was cuffed, and the logo on the sweatpants had been mostly washed off.

They outlined his body in a way that made it hard not to stare.

Sometimes I wonder if boys know how good they look in clothes. I’m sure some of them do, I mean, Callum probably knows. I’m sure Callum has spent hours in shops, trying to find the shirts that showed off his intimidating biceps. Stephen, though? I doubt he’d ever approached a piece of clothing with the question of whether it would make him look hot. He probably mostly worried about sleeves and trouser legs being long enough.

I let my eyes drift up the slender waist to the curve of his chest, the strong shoulders, and decided that tee shirts are a thing Stephen should wear. First of all, his arms are all long bones and surprising swells of muscle, with an athlete’s prominent veins down the backs of his wrists. Second, he has one of those long necks with prominent tendons and pale skin. Because he's been off the grid for days, there’s a fair amount of stubble there.

When I looked a little higher, though, I gave a little gasp of shock. Sometime after I’d fallen asleep, he’d cut his hair. Not just cut it--buzzed it short, like something that wouldn’t be out of place in the army. I hadn’t realized how dark his eyelashes were. Or how thick his eyebrows looked.

That was another thing--he wasn’t wearing his glasses. I looked for them on the bedside table, but saw only a ceramic mug with the dried tag of a teabag dangling from the handle.

My gasp must have been kind of loud. There was movement behind the closed lids, then his chest expanded and he gave a little twitch, hand moving to catch the sliding laptop.

“Guess I wasn't the only tired one,” I said.

Stephen had been trying to resituate the computer when I spoke, and his gaze flashed to me in surprise. The screensaver blinked off, lighting up his face in bright blue-white. His eyes were dark. Brown, not the normal clear blue-gray I was used to.

He was wearing contacts. Stephen Lancaster must have dark eyes.

Stephen sucked in a breath, cleared his throat, and looked back at his laptop. “I must have been more tired than I thought. I was waiting for you to wake before I gave you these. Marigold said every four hours should be fine, if you feel you need them. I can’t imagine you don’t.”

He set the laptop on the bedside table and grabbed up a pair of pills. I fought the entrapment of covers, which was more difficult because Stephen was pinning them down on one side. Normally, I’d have said something, but I knew he’d use it as an excuse to leave, and I really, really didn’t want him to.

I earned a flash of pain in my shoulder for my struggles, and though I thought I did a pretty good job of stopping any noise, the slight hiss was enough. Stephen twisted to look at me, realized my dilemma, and stood.

“It’s fine,” I said, embarrassed that he had to grab my arm to keep me from falling back into the pillows. It was like I’d never done a single sit-up in my entire life--my stomach muscles were just that weak.

I shoved the covers away and scooted back against the headboard. Stephen handed me the painkillers, and regarded the mug on the bedside. The string was brown, having wicked up the tea and dried against the porcelain. I could only imagine the contents of the mug were both highly-concentrated and ice cold.

“I’ll get something for you to take those with,” Stephen said. “This is past its best.”

I snagged his hand. “Wait.”

I was so tired, I’m not sure how my reflexes managed it, but there was a flutter of anxiety in my belly that told me I should keep Stephen near. I couldn’t let him re-engage with the world outside this room or he’d remember something else he had to do and, in a fit of responsibility, stop paying attention to me. Call me selfish, but I kind of wanted his full attention right now.

“It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t care if it’s cold.”

Stephen hesitated. I squeezed his hand and gave him a little tug. He resisted, frowning at the tea. “No self-respecting English person would let you drink this.”

“Stephen. Give me the stupid tea. I am in too much pain right now to care how I get these painkillers into me.”

That did it. I mean, I might have overstated how much I was hurting, but then again, there was a quiet, pulsating burn in my shoulder that seemed to be getting worse. My painkillers from that morning had totally worn off. I could feel every spot where the needle had gone into my skin, and the deeper root of aching pain that was the stabbed muscle. Maybe I wasn’t really overstating that much.

He handed over themug, and I took my pills. The tea was awful--bitter and so strong that it managed to dry out my mouth when I swallowed it. I handed the mug back to Stephen, who had a look on his face that plainly said, ‘I did warn you’.

I was still holding his hand. It had gone warm in mine, loosely curled to keep my palm against his. “What’s everyone else doing?” I asked.

“Boo went home to mollify her parents. Callum and Freddie went to check out some disability records at the municipal office. We have a lead on one of Sid and Sadie’s old crew. I was checking through available microfilm--what’s been digitized, anyway, which is quite a bit of the old stuff.”

“What about Thorpe?”

“Home office. Reporting in with our pictures. We’ll need legal IDs, passports, and I imagine I’ll need a warrant card.”

“So you’re still going to be police?”

Stephen shrugged. “I’m not sure what else I could be.”

“I thought we covered this. You’re going to be a cabbie.”

“For some reason, Thorpe thought the idea didn’t suit.”

“Wonder why.”

“Not a clue.”

I smiled and did not point out the fact that I’d noticed Stephen and I were in the house alone. Neither did he.

To my surprise, he sat down. One leg off the side, one bent up on the mattress, he leaned back into the headboard next to me. I was a little disappointed when he slipped his fingers from their awkward tangle with mine. My hand curled in on itself, as if trying to capture the retreating warmth.

“I mean, you’d still get to drive drunk people around,” I said, trying to pretend I didn’t care that he’d pulled away.

“Remarkably similar job to police, actually,” he said, untying the sneaker that was up on the bed. “Except I’d be taking them to the next bar.”

He pulled off his shoe, shoved the other off with his foot, and drew both feet onto the bed. With the covers shoved down, I guess he hadn’t wanted to put his shoes up on the sheets. 

That was when Stephen turned his hand over, palm up, on the crumpled sheet between us.

I paused. Processed. Moved my hand. My fingers slid between his until they caught at the join and his hand spread, letting them weave closer. We stayed that way for several breaths, staring at our joined hands instead of at each other. 

His palm was much bigger than mine, surprisingly callused along the base of his fingers. Rowing? I guess all that pulling at oars was bound to create some wear and tear. I ran my thumb along the rough skin between his thumb and forefinger, where there seemed to be another callus. Then I finally let myself tip sideways, leaning my head heavily on his shoulder. The blue shirt felt soft against my cheek, and his ware the passed through it easily.

“I’m not sure about this Stephen Lancaster,” I said. Stephen grunted. “I miss the glasses.”

“I keep trying to adjust them,” he agreed. “I only ever wore contacts to play rugby, so I’m not used to being without glasses. Still, It’s a more effective disguise than one might think.”

“Clark Kent and Superman proved that, I guess,” I said. “But won’t it make it easier for computers and stuff?”

Stephen shrugged. “It’s true, the eye area is crucial for fooling facial recognition software, but it’s unlikely that anyone looking for us would have access to it. This will fool a passing glance. That’s all we need it to do for now.”

I should have been more worried, but his thumb had starting drifting in soft arcs from my thumb knuckle to my wrist. My nerves were waking up, the feeling pinging through my synapses until my whole arm tingled with that one small touch.

“You could grow a beard,” I said. “Rock the grad-student look.”

“Could do. Thorpe did suggest it.”

“It would definitely make you look...not like you. The hair. That’s weird. Not as weird as mine, but weird.”

I felt him turn his head. “Yours isn’t that weird.”

“It is. I keep scaring myself in the mirror. I look like my Granny Deveaux and that is just freaking me out. You’ve heard the stories about her.”

Stephen nodded. Then he leaned his cheek against the top of my head and suddenly I didn't care anymore about hair or contacts or whether I looked like Granny Deveaux. I pulled his hand against me, cradling the back of it against my stomach, and tucked my elbow into the crook of his. He sighed, and it sounded… kind of unhappy.

“What?” I said, glancing up at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“You suck at lying, Stephen. Is it…” I lifted my head, started to untangle my fingers from his. It was possible he still hadn’t realized my display with Jerome in front of the Athenaum club had been a ploy. Or maybe the fact that I was capable of making that sort of ploy at all was the problem. Maybe he didn’t trust that I wasn’t trying to play him too.

His hand tightened around mine, arresting my attempt to move away. “Nothing’s wrong, Rory. I’m just thinking.”

Some of the tension left my shoulders, but I still couldn’t quite relax. “About what?”

He looked down at our twined fingers and, after a moment’s hesitation, pulled them onto his knee. Then my hand was completely enveloped in both of his. He took a long moment to marshal his thoughts. I practically watched him constructing sentences behind his eyes, disregarding them, hunting for new words to express whatever it was that was bothering him.

It was hard not to prompt him, but like reaching for a shy cat before it was ready to approach, it was best to wait for Stephen. So that’s what I did.

At last, he gave a soft sigh. “I know you have a new identity, and that Thorpe has come up with something to tell your parents for now. At least until this is all over. What are your thoughts on...after. Do you think you’d want to go home?”

I’m kind of an expert at dodging serious conversations, but I was pretty sure that a joke right now would shut down the part of Stephen that was willing to tell me stuff. So, despite this being a topic I’d been avoiding--even in my own head--I forced myself to think about it.

What did I want to do? Could I go back to Louisiana? To Benouville, where no one knew about the Sight, or the Squad, or anything I’d been through other than what had been on TV or in my post-stabbing emails to friends. Could I stand that? Probably not. Then again, could I really handle staying in London forever, half a day’s plane-ride from my family and the place I still thought of as home?

“I think… I’m pretty sure I’d go insane if I went home. I don’t know what I’d do without you guys. I’d start to question everything. I’d stop thinking any of it was real, you know?”

Stephen nodded, and started fiddling with one of my fingers.

“Still, like, I have no idea if I can ever say forever, you know? I mean, can you say forever?”

Quietly, and without hesitation, Stephen said, “Yes.”

I blinked.

“But I don't have anything to lose by staying,” he said. “All I have is my job, and the squad.”

“And me,” I said. “Unless you're finally ready to admit I'm part of the squad.”

He pinched my knuckle softly. “Hmm. Thorpe has sort of made that decision.”

I frowned. “But you still don't like it.”

“There's a reason for that.”

“Wanna tell me what it is?”

He sighed and knocked his head back against the wall. “I just don't want you to make a hasty decision because it feels like you've got no other future. You do. You have a family and a life back in Louisiana that you would be giving up to stay here.”

I pulled my hand back, suddenly feeling a little hurt. He didn't resist, which expanded the feeling to a genuine, hollow ache in my chest. “Do you not want me to stay or something?”

Stephen closed his eyes. “That's not what I wanted you to take from this. Rory, I'm supposed to-” He stopped himself abruptly.

I was starting to feel a bit dizzy--the painkillers kicking in--but I didn't miss this slip.

“Supposed to what?”

“Lead the squad.”

I snapped my fingers in front of his face to get him to look at me.When he did, I lifted my eyebrows expectantly. “Wanna try that again? What were you actually going to say?”

He held my gaze, and with the short hair and the contacts and the dark eyes, it was super weird. It was Stephen, but it was a weird, dream-zone version of Stephen where some of the details were wrong.

Dream. I remembered him looking at me like this once in a dream. He'd been sitting next to me, on the grass, in a sort of agony of indecision.

“Stephen,” I implored, and I covered his hands with mine. “Tell me what you're supposed to do.”

He clenched his jaw. I waited.

“Do you trust me, Rory?”

Well that was a weirdly blindsiding question. “Yes,” I said, putting all the force of that truth into the word. “Of course. I trust you more than pretty much anyone on the planet.”

There was an almost-imperceptible wince. “And what if I were to put the safety of...millions of people before… Rory, I hate this. It drives me mad that I've got to weigh your autonomy against the safety of...well, everything. London. The world, maybe, I don't know how far this goes.”

“My...autonomy? Stephen, you're not making sense.”

“You can't leave London.”

The hurt that had opened up inside me healed a little with those words, or it wanted to. Stephen wanted me to stay. But something in the back of my head said that his tone had been wrong. Something about the way he'd said it…

“What do you mean, can't?” I asked.

He closed his eyes. “I mean, I don’t know what happens if you leave. You went to Bristol, and it was fine. But Louisiana is a lot farther away. You saw what happened when the Oswolf stone was moved--I don’t know what happens if you go away. The termini have been in London for hundreds of years.”

“But I’m not the only one anymore.”

“Which might be the only thing that kept it all from falling apart.”

My stomach was twisting now, dread rising in me alongside a chill certainty. “You lied about the Shadow Cabinet,” I said. “It is real.”

He folded his hands together. “I thought you might have remembered, at first. I did tell you about it, when you came to get me in...whatever interstitial world it was where I went instead of passing on. I told you about the Shadow Cabinet. But Rory, this does not pass outside the two of us. No one else can know. Not Thorpe, not Boo or Callum or Freddie.”

I swallowed. “So...why are you telling me?”

“I shouldn’t. I should be doing my level best to convince you to stay.”

“So why are you?”

He looked at me, then back down at his knees. “Because I want you to know why. If you decided you wanted to leave, I couldn’t let you. I would have to...do whatever I could. It wouldn’t matter if you wanted to go home.”

I stared at him a moment. “So if I tried to buy a plane ticket to Louisiana and headed to the airport, you’d, like, snatch me off the train?”

He swallowed. “I would...try to convince you. I wouldn’t want to do anything to-”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. Stephen froze. “If I’m the one who can’t leave, why don’t they just recruit me and say, ‘by the way, Rory, if you leave London, the entire world gets consumed by a thick fog of dead people and life as we know it ceases to exist.’ Seems like it’s my life, so it should be my responsibility.”

I burrowed my fingers between Stephen’s loosely-cupped hands. “Hey. Stop worrying. If my going back to Louisiana is going to, like, destroy the world or something, I won’t do it. I’ll stay in London.”

“If you decided not to, I don’t know what I would do.”

“I trust you.”

“You shouldn’t. I don’t know if my sense of duty or...or caring about your freedom would be stronger in the end.”

“Stephen, it’s okay,” I said, shifting onto my knees. I wobbled as the world tilted, my body heavy with the onset of painkillers. Stephen’s hands took my waist.

“Rory, you probably shouldn’t-”

I managed to turn around and face him, my knees digging into the mattress next to his legs. I steadied myself with both hands on his chest, looking down at his face.

“It’s okay,” I repeated. “I’m not going to make you choose.”

He gazed up at me, and without his glasses to protect him, I could see everything. I watched the moment he understood, saw the slight sliver of blue around his pupils vanish as they dilated. I was going to stay. I was promising to stay, not just because it might mean the end of the world if I didn’t, but because I would never, ever want to hurt him by making him choose between his duty...and me.

Stephen blinked rapidly. Then his hands moved up to my ribcage and he tried to direct me back to sitting against the headboard. I didn’t let him. I didn’t want that.

I pressed my hand more firmly against his chest. “Don’t.”

He halted, grip gentling. “Sorry,” he said. “Are there bruises, or-”

“Maybe. I have no idea. I can’t feel any of it right now.” He looked confused. I sat back on my heels, twisting my fingers into his shirt a bit. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure what to say. He was close enough to smell. Detergent and the cheap soap from the drugstore, dulled by the time since his shower. I caught a whiff of the car exhaust that seemed to permeate the street in front of the safe house.

What I wanted was answers. What I wanted was for him to give me some sign that my feelings weren’t one-sided. He cared about me, sure. But dumb as it sounds, that wasn’t good enough. I didn’t want him to care about me. That wasn’t how I felt about him. That wasn’t even in spitting-distance of how I felt.

My limbs were heavy and drunk. I swayed a bit on my knees.

Stephen’s hands tightened again. “Rory. Sit down.”

“Not until you answer something.”

He took my hand, the one on my injured side, and moved it from his chest. “I’ll answer, but you need to keep your weight off that shoulder.”

I hadn’t realized I was leaning into my hands that hard, but I was. Half my weight was shifted forward, pressing my palm into his chest. I could have pinned him, had I been heavy enough or strong enough to do it. Stephen’s fingers were firm on my wrist and hip, and I let him guide me back so I settled on my heels. He had to sit forward to do this, which I didn’t like. It made it too easy for him to get up and leave.

My whole body felt heavy, and an unbearable ache had started in my chest. My head sank forward with the weight of the drugs. I forced myself to breathe deeply, try to clear the tangle of drunken distress from around my thoughts.

Stephen had let go of my hip, and I felt his hand on my good arm now. He rubbed it a bit, comfortingly.

“We can talk about this later,” he said. “When you’re not quite so out of sorts.”

He was about to pull away. I could tell. He would make sure I was comfortable, and then he would leave to let me sleep off the pills.

“Why can’t you just ask me to stay?”

The words were out before I could stop them, but I didn’t regret them. I really wanted to know.

Stephen’s hand stilled on my arm. “I...wanted you to make your own decision. It’s not fair to-”

“Then be unfair! Do you want me to stay? Not because I’m a terminus or whatever, but because you want me to?”

“That isn’t the point.”

“Yes, it is. It’s my point. I can’t go home anyway, so there’s no point in asking whether I want to stay. Just...tell me you weren’t pretending to like me. Lying, to make me stay.”

Stephen’s hand tightened on my good arm. “That’s exactly what I didn’t want you to think.”

“You definitely kissed me back.”

“I did.”

“Was that…?”

“Do you want to stay in London? Because if you don’t, there’s a window where you might be able to leave. A very small one, but we could do a test. See if the other Termini are enough to hold London in balance if you weren’t…” he trailed off. Possibly because he knew he was evading my questions, but probably because I had started crying.

I wasn’t sobbing or anything, but the hollow ache in my chest had finally grown so large that it displaced everything else. It pushed my heart into my throat, pressed the tears out in steady, hot streaks down my face.

There was a moment where he just froze. And then something in his posture, in the air around him, seemed to break.

“Don’t,” he said, his voice gone low and sad. “Rory, please don’t.” His hands were on my face, warm and sweeping at the tears. And then he was pulling me into his chest and I was sinking into him, holding on tight with my good arm. “I’m an idiot, I know,” he said. “A miserable prat with absolutely no context for what’s happening. I’m...I’m trying to do what’s right. Only I don’t know how to do it.”

I rested my cheek across his collarbone and tucked my knees up, making myself small in his embrace. “If you could be selfish instead of...well, acting like you usually do,” I said. “What would you do?”

He was quiet for a moment. Then his hand was under the back of my shirt, making long, soothing strokes up my spine. “I’d ask you to stay.”

“So…?”

His other hand joined his first, and I couldn’t have said whether it was the drugs or the soporific stroke of his touch on my skin making me lightheaded. I turned a little in his arms, shifting so we were chest-to-chest, and pulled myself close with my good arm.

Stephen turned his head enough to kiss my temple. I tilted my chin up, and he didn’t need further prompting or encouragement. He kissed me.

**Author's Note:**

> I like to scare Stephen into admitting things, so here's a little plot bunny I chased down to do just that. Not sure if I'm going to follow up on the plot involving Syd and Sadie--I just needed window dressing for the fluff. I might just have fun with the safe house for a while.


End file.
